An Analysis of Gerontion by T.S. Eliot

Gültekin Boran

Abstract

Thomas Stearns Eliot, who is believed to be one of the most important poets of his time in the English and American Poetry, as well as today, left many poems in most of which he criticized and even rejected the Western Puritanist society and the principles of Romanticism. In this brief study, one of T.S. Eliot’s major poems, ‘Gerontion’ will be presented with other critics’ and this researcher’s interpretations. The speaker of the poem is an old man in an old house whose thoughts drift while being read to by a boy, and these thoughts form the poem. He misses fighting in the war and laments his presence in the mundane and common-place house (Basu, 2017). Since it will be useful to know T.S. Eliot’s philosophy of life and his background in order to understand and interpret his works better, his life story and background are also provided briefly in the first part of this study. In the final part, conclusions in connection with the society in which we live in were drawn from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’.